1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to systems management in a dynamic electronic-business (e-business) network environment, and in particular, but not exclusively to, a method, apparatus and computer instructions for maintaining compatibility within a distributed systems management environment with a plurality of configuration versions.
2. Description of Related Art
The use of the Internet for business transactions has increased significantly in recent years. In fact, the term “e-business” has evolved to mean doing business on-line. WebSphere is a set of Java™-based tools developed by International Business Machines Corporation of Armonk, N.Y., which allows customers to create and manage relatively sophisticated e-business Web sites. The primary WebSphere tool is the WebSphere Application Server, which is a Java™-based, high-performance Web applications server that businesses can use to connect Web site customers with e-business applications.
In a distributed computing environment, such as, for example, the WebSphere 5.0 Network Deployment (ND) Applications Server, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) product environment, a plurality of computing nodes (e.g., logical grouping of servers) are managed by an administrative facility that provides configuration settings for software applications being executed on the computing nodes. The configuration data for the WebSphere computing environment is stored in a master repository associated with the administrative facility and can be accessed as Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents.
A significant problem arises when different nodes in the computing environment are being operated with different versions of the WebSphere product, and the administrative facility synchronizes the nodes by sending configuration settings from the master repository to the nodes. The configuration settings “synched out” to the nodes can be for newer versions of the WebSphere product. Consequently, nodes configured with the older version settings are unable to operate with the format of the newer version configuration settings.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method, apparatus and computer instructions for maintaining the compatibility of multiple nodes in a distributed systems management environment with multiple configuration settings, such as, for example, a WebSphere 5.x and/or 6.x Network Deployment (ND) Applications Server J2EE product environment.